As the name suggests, requirement gathering is all about gathering the relevant information about the project, including the infrastructure information, technical information like data sources and connectivity, dashboarding and reporting requirements, and user and licensing information. In short, requirement gathering is all about an understanding of each and every aspect needed to design and implement the perfect solution.

Let us understand requirement gathering using a real life example.

Let us picture going for a vacation. Once you have taken the decision, the next question is--What are the various factors I need to ponder?

Most of us will start making notes of basic questions, like the ones mentioned next:

• Where do I want to go for a vacation?
• What is the budget?
• What is the duration of the vacation?
• How will I travel to the location?
• Where will I stay?

Once you start answering these questions, there will be another set of questions which you will have to answer or try to get answers to, like:

• What are all the places to visit at that location?
• Which is the best hotel fitting my budget?
• Should I go for an American Plan or European Plan?
• How do I plan the local transportation?
• Where do I get Foreign Exchange (Forex) from?
• What will the weather be like, and what kind of clothes will be needed?
• Should I go for a packaged tour or should I explore on my own?

And so on.

The key to having a great vacation is to ask yourself as many questions as possible. Asking these questions and getting answers to them will make you well prepared for your tour and you will enjoy it for sure.

The process that you followed in this example was continuing to ask various questions to get clarity. The in-depth questions will definitely help you to plan the vacation and get the most out of it. This process of getting into details and trying to understand the problem statement is called requirement gathering.

When it comes to requirement gathering for the Qlik Sense implementation, you should take the brief scope document as the starting point for requirement gathering. The scope document is important for the BI projects. The scope document provides an overview of the project and the requirement gathering takes over from scope document and is all about detailing. If you don’t have a scope document, things can go haywire.

A project could be executed as a fixed cost project or it could be based on time and material. Irrespective of the model chosen, it is important that you have the scope for the project defined, and the same should be documented.

If you have not created the scope document, then it is recommended that you define the scope of the project first. The sample format of a scope document has been covered in the previous chapter.